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Faith Voting: A Voting Mechanism Incorporated into a Bionic Dynamic Model | Rhythm Research Institute Talks about Governance Series 1

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The belief voting mechanism provides a solution to the problems that arise in traditional voting mechanisms.

Author: Rhythm Research Institute

Traditional on-chain governance voting is a time-boxed voting mechanism (Time-boxed Voting Mechanism), that is, when the voting expires, the voting results are counted according to the current number of votes. There are many problems with this voting mechanism, such as: buying votes, plutocracy, witch attacks, large fluctuations in votes at the last minute, voter indifference...

For voters, they will continue to maintain and advocate the proposals they support, and a single time-limited vote cannot fully reflect the degree of preference of voters. At the same time, the wishes of voters may also change, but if voters continue to support a proposal, it means that voters have a strong belief in the proposal. The beliefs of these long-term supporters should have more influence on the proposal than those of short-term supporters. So how do you quantify belief?

The Conviction Voting Mechanism used by the decentralized autonomous organization 1Hive provides a solution.

Conviction voting eliminates the Sybil attack problem, is resilient to collusion attacks, and minimizes time-limited voting mechanisms possible attack vectors.

What is Conviction Voting:

The concept of faith-based voting was jointly proposed by the consulting research institutions Block Science and Common Stack. In the belief vote, proposal supporters need to express their belief in the proposal in the form of continuous support. The community will give equal opportunities to all proposals, and users can participate in different proposals to vote according to their own preferences. User preferences are like water in a faucet, and proposals are buckets, and users pour their preferences into different buckets according to their wishes.

Image source: " Conviction Voting: A Novel Continuous Decision Making Alternative to Governance》

When a user chooses to vote on a proposal, a belief value will be added to his voting rights, and the belief value will be based on the length of time the user participates in the proposal and The half-life curve rate increases up to a certain limit. When the user decides to transfer the governance right to other proposals, the user's belief value will gradually decrease according to the half-life curve rate, just like there is a small hole in the bucket, and the water in the bucket will slowly drain. Using the rate of the half-life curve to determine the growth and decrease of the belief value can introduce a time dynamic model into the system, which makes the change law of the system closer to the law of nature.

Comparing the belief voting mechanism with the human brain operation mechanism, we can see the bionic nature of this voting mechanism. The growth of group preference for a proposal is like the growth of action potentials in neurons. When the group preference value for a proposal rises to a preset threshold, the proposal will be allowed to pass, just as the potential difference reaches the potential threshold, and the neuron will will be "activated".

It may be more helpful to understand if the trust mechanism is compared to the belief voting mechanism. Trust takes time to accumulate. When trust reaches a certain level and reaches a certain threshold, you can trust the other party to complete important things with confidence. But when the other party does anything that damages the reputation, your trust in the other party will not be instantly zeroed, but like the above-mentioned loophole bucket, the trust will be slowly lost.

This is how the belief voting mechanism turns the continuous flow of information about individual preferences into an independent criterion for judging decisions. Through this mechanism to organize community opinions, we can obtain information about group opinions at that moment to help make decisions on proposals.

Problems with traditional on-chain voting:

The perpetrators with financial resources usually carry out governance attacks through three methods: buying ticket rights, plutocratic rule, and witch attacks. Buying voting rights means that perpetrators bribe voters by bribery, instructing voters to vote according to the perpetrators' wishes. Plutocratic rule means that perpetrators purchase governance tokens in large quantities from voters to gain governance authority. Sybil attack means that perpetrators allocate a large number of governance tokens to multiple accounts for voting in order to bring unequal influence advantages to perpetrators. These three governance attack vectors are the most common in today’s on-chain voting systems.

Last-minute vote swings are another problem with time-bound voting. Since in the time-limited voting mechanism, the time of voting will not affect the final voting result, strategic voters will wait until the last moment to make their final choice according to the vote type at that time.

Voter apathy is also a problem that cannot be underestimated for on-chain voting governance. Data shows that only 3.8% of governance tokens participated in the recent Aragon AGP voting. In the just-concluded Uniswap first proposal vote, only 18.8% of the governance tokens participated in the vote, and the number of votes in favor failed to reach the preset threshold, which eventually led to the proposal not being passed. The main factor leading to the low governance participation rate is the poor voting experience. Users need to initiate multiple transactions in a short period of time to vote.

How does the belief voting mechanism solve these problems:

Because in the belief voting mechanism, the belief value has an important influence on the final decision whether the proposal is passed, and the belief value is closely related to the time when voters participate in the proposal, so if the perpetrators want to carry out governance attacks in the belief voting mechanism system, their The cost of doing evil will be greatly increased. If perpetrators want to attack by buying voting rights, the cost they need to pay will be various opportunity costs during the lock-up period of governance tokens, and this continuous cost will far exceed the single-point cost of buying one vote at a time . For plutocratic attacks, perpetrators need to purchase a large number of governance tokens from token holders and hold them continuously during the voting period. At this time, the perpetrators not only have to bear the various opportunity costs of the currency purchase funds, but also need to bear the systemic risks brought by the market when holding the tokens and the specific risks of the project. After analysis, it shows that the belief value is only affected by the time factor, so the witch attack has no effect in this mechanism.

Because the circulation of tokens is non-resistance and transparent, this led to the problem of large fluctuations in the number of votes at the last moment possible. However, in the belief voting mechanism, the belief value plays a decisive role, and the increase and decrease of the belief value are determined by the half-life curve rate, which makes the voting volume pouring in at the last moment worthless, and the voting results will be determined by long-term participation in this Proposal voters.

To address voter apathy, the voting process needs to be as simple as possible. First of all, users have 100% voting rights. When users enter the community, they need to vote 100% of their voting rights to existing proposals in the community in proportion to their preferences. In order to preserve the liquidity of governance tokens, they can use It is carried out in a form similar to ERC-888. When users want to participate in other proposals, they can transfer voting rights to other proposals at any time. The user's voting right for the proposal is proportional to the token holding. When the user buys and sells tokens, the system will automatically update the user's voting weight in the proposal, and the user can check the update at any time. In order to encourage community founders to continue to participate in community proposals and voting activities, the locked tokens of the founders will be unlocked according to their contributions to the community. For example: Unlock according to the pass rate of the proposal made by the founder.

While the belief voting mechanism solves many of the problems that arise with time bound voting mechanisms, this complexity has not yet been implemented in We are still experimenting with other large communities, so all the advantages mentioned above are only theoretical conjectures. On-chain governance is the core pillar of the encrypted economy, and the belief voting mechanism may bring new hope.